From Free Software Magazine: "Google promises a much needed shift in the way small computers work. Problems like software updates, backups, installation, maintenance, viruses, have plagued the world for too long: a shift is way overdue. To me, however, the change about to happen shows us what many people have refused to believe for a long time: KDE and GNOME shot each other dead."

I love how people are declaring the unstable alpha release the winner of the Linux desktop flame wars. GoogleOS is not even all that unique. There is some other OS that uses the Firefox render engine for the desktop and was going to be all web based as well, but it never took off. But it also did not have much cash to work with either.

Given the small size of everything involved with this web-book thing they are pushing, I have my doubts that it will work well. To take all the game PDF's I have on my laptop and put them on a server somewhere would cost too much for just a hobby, and hosting them from home would be too slow with the upload speeds that US ISP's have. It is workable, but not ideal.
Since they are downplaying local storage, the 8GB's of PDF's would east most of the disk for the system.

For anyone with lots of data, or sensitive data, this thing will not work. But as a technology preview of Google web apps, it will probably cost less then a nation-wide advertising campaign.